Archive for December, 2008

As the year ends, it’s time to see which plugin developers created the most sought-after WordPress plugins for 2008. Fortunately, W-Shadow.com has compiled a list of the top WordPress plugin developers using rankings from the number of downloads from the wordpress.org plugin directory.

One of the most common ways your WordPress blog can be compromised would be by brute force attacks. A brute force attack is the most widely known password cracking method. This attack simply tries to use every possible character combination as a password. To recover a one-character password it is enough to try 26 combinations (â€˜aâ€™ to â€˜zâ€™). Luckily, a WordPress plugin is there to protect your blog from such attacks.

Login LockDown records the IP address and timestamp of every failed WordPress login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range. This helps to prevent brute force password discovery.

Currently the plugin defaults to a 1 hour lock out of an IP block after 3 failed login attempts within 5 minutes. This can be modified via the Options panel. Admisitrators can release locked out IP ranges manually from the panel.

Installation instructions:

1. Extract loginlockdown-1.2.zip into your wp-content/plugins directory into its own folder (note: not the root plugins folder, as this may cause the activation routine to fail).
2. Activate the plugin in the Plugin options.
3. Customize the settings from the Options panel, if desired.

Requires at least WordPress 2.5, tested up to 2.5.1, however, I’m using it on my WordPress 2.7 blog with no problems at all.

WP Review Site turns WordPress into a powerful review site engine. It allows you to easily create niche review sites about anything and everything you want, be it products, computers, gadgets, music, movies, services, websites, restaurants, hotels, credit cards or even beer.

WP Review Site combines has these features:

Add a star rating system to your comment forms – This enables visitors to your WP blog do more than just leave comments: they can write a review and rate it via mousing over star icons. You define the categories, and your visitors can rate between 1 to 5 stars. And WP Review Site is completely customizable to fit your blogâ€™s design; you can display rankings as you see fit, whether you use tables or CSS.

And WP Review Site lets you sort reviews by weighted average rating: you can set it to display reviews by the highest/lowest-rated, and not in chronological order. You can even choose to not show the rating system in some parts of your site. WP Review Site even has various sidebar widgets for you to add a list of top rated items to your siteâ€™s sidebar, or a list of recent reviews with the average rating that user left.

And what makes WP Review Site even better for me is that it already comes with seven themes preconfigured to work with the plugin:

WP Review Site

WPRS: Aqua Featured

WPRS: Award Winning Hosts

WPRS: Bonus Black

WPRS: Double Silver

WPRS: Green Featured

WPRS: Ocean

And even better, WP Review Site has already got its own affiliate link management system that will let you configure your links easier. Instead of inserting the URL for the same anchor text over and over, you can set your review blog to automatically insert affiliate links.

What I donâ€™t care for, however, is the fact that the customization features of WP Review Site is spread over two options pages. Iâ€™d like to have everything in one configuration page.

For $97 dollars, youâ€™d get free upgrades for life along with all the features mentioned above.

Pros:

WP Review Site does the work of many different plugins to make WordPress work as a powerful affiliate review site.

It looks as if Byline (a popular iPhone app for Google Reader) and BlogPress (the unofficial iPhone app for Blogger) are teaming up for the holidays by offering users the chance to download one of their respective apps for free after purchasing the other application on iTunes. Read More

The new Dashboard in WordPress 2.7, with the left hand navigation, has been found by many people, me included, to be the Dashboard the best one yet. However there are those who prefer the old topbar navigation of WordPress versions past.

This is where Ozh’s Admin Drop Down Menu come in to be very handy. Originally meant as a way to reduce clicks and to make navigation faster, the plugin retains the topbar navigation and has a lot of new features for WordPress 2.7 users.

According to the plugin author, “When WordPress 2.7 and its new and optimized user interface came, I thought there was still room for improvements: a horizontal menu gave the admin area more of a â€œdesktop applicationâ€ feel, and I think itâ€™s superior to a vertical menu.” Read More

This is probably the most anticipated version of WordPress yet, and I won’t blame those who are excited for it. The new Dashboard, the new icons, and the new features make 2.7 the best WordPress yet.

Every aspect of the new interface has been consulted with WP users through a lot of surveys and the result is a WordPress thatâ€™s just plain faster. Nearly every task you do on your blog will take fewer clicks and be faster in 2.7 than it did in a previous version.

And new features have been included in 2.7 as well: QuickPress, comment threading, paging, and the ability to reply to comments from your dashboard, the ability to install any plugin directly from WordPress.org with a single click, and sticky posts. You can even customize any page in WordPress through drag-and-drop.

And most importantly, you will not have to install WordPress manually again. The new built-in upgrade feature will automatically notify you of new releases, and when youâ€™re ready it will download them, install them, and upgrade your blog with a single click.

According to Matt Mullenweg, the community was so involved with every step of the process. Over 150 people contributed code directly to the release, the highest number yet, and that is the reason why 2.7 is such a huge leap forward.

So if you haven’t tried 2.7 yet, don’t be afraid, just go ahead and install Coltrane on your blog. You won’t regret it.

I’ve used various plugins and webapps for measuring my site statistics on my WordPress blogs. Each one has its own merits and disadvantages of course, but whether you choose a plugin that will give you stats from an external server or one that will render reports from your own database, it’s really up to you. I, for one, prefer using WordPress in-server plugins to check my stats. Nothing beats real-time updates. I’ve gone through lots of plugins, but for now I am loving every bit out of WP-StatPress.

According to the site, WP-StatPress is the free plug-in for WordPress dedicated to the real-time management of statistics about blog visits. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers, etc.

As you can see, data is presented in a way that is easily understood right away, especially by the novice. This is what makes WP-StatPress stand out. Upon opening WP-StatPress, you immediately see a graph showing your traffic for the month, something that other plugins lack. There is even a “Spy” function, that will let you check who is currently on your blog and what pages are they visiting.

StatPress also includes a widget one can possibly add to a sidebar, or you can use PHP if you’re not into widgets. And this is what sold WP-StatPress to me: it can automatically delete older records to allow the insertion of newer records when limited space is present. It will help you fight database bloat that’s present in other plugins. It can halp you trim down your database without going to PHPmyadmin.

If you like what you see, you can try and download WP-StatPress here and leave a comment if it works the way you want it to, or if you want it to add more features.

UPDATE: Apparently WP-StatPress is no longer updated by the developer. Thankfully, Pascal was able to point us to a fork/continuation of the WP-StatPress project, StatPress Reloaded.

Microblogging service Pownce, once touted as Twitter’s heir apparent, is closing down on December 15. The Pownce team has joined SixApart, and they will be bringing their technology with them. The team is now working on an export tool that will let users transfer their posts to other blogging services such as Vox, TypePad, or WordPress. Leah Culver writes on the Pownce blog:

We?re very happy that Six Apart wants to invest in growing the vision that we the founders of Pownce believe so strongly in and we?re very excited to take our vision to all of Six Apart?s products. Mike and I have joined Six Apart as part of their engineering team and we?re looking forward to being a part of the talented group that has created amazing tools for blogging and publishing.

Even though they will be coming up with an export tool soon, those who paid for Pro accounts have been told that they will be emailed soon with more information. On the Six Apart blog though, they’ve announced that Pownce Pro users will get a year’s TypePad pro account for free. As for the Pownce team, they seem to have settled into Vox. Leah Culver and Mike Malone has made Vox their new home. So Pownce is closing, Leah and Mike are joining Vox, but will the community join in? Six Apart hopes so. What’s your take? Leave your opinion in the comments.

With WordPress 2.7 release date looming as close as ever, the WordPress team has released the 2.7 Release Candidate 1. RC1 ushers in the final leg of development for 2.7. RC1 contains 280 commits since beta 3, includes the new and polished UI everyone’s excited for, plus the icon set that won in ProjectIcon. And the new login page looks good too.

While we self-hosted WordPress users impatiently wait for the final 2.7 build to come out, the lucky guys on WordPress.com will be getting 2.7 on December 4 at 8pm Eastern Time. Thatâ€™s 5pm Thursday in California, 1am Friday in London (UTC), 8am Friday in Jakarta, noon on Friday in Sydney. If you’re not too sure about your timezone, you can check it out here.

If you want to test it out, you can download RC1 here. Make sure to backup your blog first before you upgrade.